Updated 9:05 am, Saturday, February 13, 2016

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Seattle Mayor Ed Murray confers with U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez. Seattle has enacted a phased in $15-an-hour minimum wage. The Obama administration has been unable to get Congress to enact a $10-an-hour federal minimum wage. less

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray confers with U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez. Seattle has enacted a phased in $15-an-hour minimum wage. The Obama administration has been unable to get Congress to enact a $10-an-hour ... more

The great New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia once quipped: "When I make a mistake, it's a beaut." Mayor Greg Nickels found that out when snow clogged Seattle streets for days in December 2008. He didn't survive the 2009 primary.

During the 2001 Fat Tuesday riot, in which a young man was beaten to death, Mayor Paul Schell slumbered a few blocks away in his condominium. Shell was a political casualty in the September primary.

Murray will never be caught napping. He keeps two phones by his bed so Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O'Toole can reach him at any time. With any developing situation, and any disorder, "the mayor should know," he said.

He has experienced days that drain.

On June 7, 2014, Murray spent hours at Seattle Pacific University, where a gunman had killed one student and injured two other people. He ended the day at the memorial for two young gay men, Dwone Anderson-Young and Ahmed Said, gunned down in Leschi as they walked home from a club.

"Part of leadership is being out there," said Murray. After a pause, he added: "It motivates me."

The first half of Murray's term has seen prosperity -- Seattle is high in all sorts of rankings of where to live and work -- but growth has inflicted severe pains on the less well-off.

The city has made genuine strides in addressing inequality.

The ramp-up to a $15-an-hour minimum wage was hammered out by a Murray-appointed panel and celebrated in Seattle by U.S. Labor secretary Tom Perez. A city-wide pre-school system is in its embryonic stage.

A U.S. Justice Department's monitor has praised progress in reforming the Seattle Police Department. The city's voters were persuade to approve a $930 million "Move Seattle" transportation plan, even though they drive on bumpy streets where repairs were promised a decade ago.

By looking at the Seattle mayor's office, you could swear that Murray was up for re-election next month.

Hizzoner runs a highly political, pretty high-pressure operation.

Aides rotate out, often to other city jobs, professing their continued loyalty but remarking on the pace. Murray keeps up the pace with an average of about three public announcements a week. He attends weekend community events at the pace of a New York mayor.

Why does this man have to run so hard? A trio of reasons:

-- He is being pressed by far-left activists who aren't seeking solutions but use every social issue as an organizing tool. The city has a cadre of professional protesters. "It is as if the left has been exposed to tactics of the far right," Murray said.

The mayor is clearly frustrated with those who, in his words, "will not cooperate, do not collaborate," and are in the business of "vilifying people on their own side." Murray believes Seattle could be "a model for the rest of the country of how progressives can collaborate to get things done."

-- Murray is having to revise the "Seattle way," the city's process-driven style, defined as everybody being consulted on everything. He believes in consultation, but "with a deadline."

The Murray solution is to appoint a task force, load it down with people who normally don't get along and hammer on it to work out an answer at least barely acceptable to all.

It doesn't work at times. Homelessness defies all deadlines. The crisis involves mentally ill people, a heroin epidemic and housing programs gutted by the Reagan administration and never restored, leading to the extraordinary challenge of getting people out of shelters and into housing.

-- It's in Murray's DNA. He's a product of the Kennedy-Johnson years in which government was seen as an agent of change, with a duty to help people. He's a social-gospel Catholic educated by Holy Cross fathers at the University of Portland.

Liberal Seattle is a lightning rod for the state's political right, even to the point of coining a vague derogatory term: "Seattle values."

"If you're a statewide candidate, run against Seattle," Todd Herman, 770 radio host, urged Republicans at their annual Roanoke Conference last month.

Senate Majority Leader Mark Schoesler, a Republican from Ritzville, spoke disparagingly of "the Sawant Democrats' way of doing business," a reference to Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant.

Murray bridles a bit. Sawant is not a Democrat and not a game player. The mayor also worries a bit, as he puts it, "that Seattle could be seen floating away from the rest of the state."

But he is fiercely proud of the city's activist government.

"Marriage equality was a Seattle value that is not a state value," he said. "A higher minimum wage is a Seattle value. Pre-K (education) is a Seattle value that is now a state value.

"Another Seattle value? Business is booming and moving here."

Columnist Joel Connelly has written about politics for the P-I since 1973.